President Donald Trump’s reported proposal for a military parade replete with tanks and marching soldiers is facing withering criticism from an unexpected quarter: retired generals.
A number of retired high-ranking military officials have spoken out about Trump’s orders for the Pentagon to begin planning a big parade, likely in Washington, D.C., since it was reported Tuesday evening by the Washington Post.
Among their objections: Military parades have traditionally been the hallmarks of totalitarian regimes, appearing in the parade would be an unwelcome distraction for rank-and-file service members and it would make it seem like the military is promoting the president and not serving the Constitution.
Retired Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling told Time Magazine that a military parade goes against U.S. democratic traditions.
“A lot of countries have histories of longtime military conquest and the power and strength of the military supporting the government, but since our inception that has not been who we are,” he said. “We’re the only nation in the world that defends a piece of paper. An ideology. And to say we’re going to strut our stuff with tanks and rocket launchers and things like that, is just not a good representation of what the military does in a democratic nation.”
I did the same on Twitter. Got some pretty “sporty” comments, many laced with profanity. It’s obvious: most military hate parades, most think this a really dumb idea. Not a scientific survey though.
Other military officials found troubling Trump’s desire for a parade, reportedly sparked after viewing a Bastille Day celebration in France, especially since it came just days after he declared - jokingly, his advisers argued - that Democratic lawmakers who did not clap for him at the State of the Union were “treasonous.”
“Donald Trump has continually shown himself to have authoritarian tendencies and this is just another worrisome example,” said Retired Major General Paul Eaton, a Senior Adviser VoteVets, a progressive political organization devoted to electing veterans to office. “For someone who just declared that it was ‘treasonous’ to not applaud him, and for someone who has, in the past, admired the tactics of everyone from Saddam Hussein to Vladimir Putin, it is clear that a military parade isn’t about saluting the military - it is about making a display of the military saluting him.”
“I used to watch them in Bulgaria,” retired Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA and National Security Agency, said on Twitter of these type of parades, another reference to the association of these events with totalitarian regimes. “Put me down as a no,” he added.
Other former military officials were concerned that the parade would be antithetical to the military’s principles.
“I’ll let military friends speak for themselves, hoping they don’t just salute Trump, but when I served in the U.S. Army, the last thing we wanted to do was parade,” tweeted John McLaughlin, who served in the CIA under the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.
Hertling added that, in the end, the parade would not actually be for the troops.
“I think having a parade in the middle of the nation’s capital is obviously not for the soldiers, it’s more for the people that watch,” Hertling continued. “And in this case it’s one particular person and that’s the President.”
Regardless of how large the event turns out to be, the undertaking poses a logistical challenge that will almost certainly cost millions of dollars. The Pentagon said it was in the midst of planning “specific details” for the parade, which was first reported by the Washington Post, but didn’t provide additional information.
Getting a wide-array of military equipment from across the nation - in some cases, the world - into Washington, along with the technicians, mechanics, and support staff, will not be easy. It may also prove difficult to choose which units to showcase, what uniforms they should wear, what equipment they should carry, and when they’re available.
The last time the U.S. had a large-scale military parade was 1991 when the U.S. military overran Saddam Hussein’s forces in Iraq after just 43 days of combat. Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of Desert Storm, led the pageantry and later joined President George H.W. Bush behind a bulletproof glass partition to watch battle-clad troops march past. The event featured Patriot missiles, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, M1-A1 Abrams tanks, and a flyover by four F-117 stealth fighters.
Streetlights had to be removed. The 67-ton tanks punched deep tread marks into the pavement. An army of 1,000 workers picked up heaps of trash left behind by the crowd of200,000 (later estimates said crowds swelled to 800,000.)
Another hurdle is where to host the event. The National Park Service maintains lengthyprotocols in hosting national celebrations on Pennsylvania Ave., where the president has indicated it should take place. The Pentagon also has a laundry list of rules and regulations regarding parades, which are laid out in a 43-page Department of Defense directive from 2001.
The idea for the parade came after Trump attended a national event in Paris for Bastille Day, a July 14 holiday marking the storming of the Bastille prison in 1789. The event is widely considered the beginning of the French Revolution, so the French carry out an annual military parade that features marching troops and high-tech weaponry.
“To a large extent because of what I witnessed, we may do something like that on July 4th in Washington, down Pennsylvania Avenue,” Trump told French President Emmanuel Macron in September before a bilateral meeting as part of a series of United Nations events.
“I don’t know, we’re gonna have to try to top it,” he said. “But we had a lot of planes going over, we had a lot of military might. It was a really beautiful thing to see.”
It wasn’t the first time Trump flirted with showing off fighting hardware. The Huffington Post obtained emails last year from his staffers asking about deploying heavy military equipment in his inaugural parade on Jan. 20, 2017. The email exchange revealed the complexities of a seemingly simple request by the Trump team when a Pentagon official told them they needed time “to make deliberate decisions about vehicle choice and configuration, paint scheme, uniform for crew members, etc.”
No equipment, except fighter jets, were approved for the event. All flyovers were ultimately canceled, however, due to inclement weather.
A Statement by Admiral Stavrides about Military Parades
Admiral Stavridis was the 16th Supreme Allied Commander at NATO and is Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University
When I showed up at the Naval Academy, the first thing they did after shaving my head was to teach me to march. Over the next four years as a Midshipman, I marched in countless parades, generally a couple every week. Like every other Midshipman to pass through the gates of Annapolis, I hated it. They are a lot of work to rehearse, don’t do anything for morale, and are expensive in terms both of time and preparation.
Every time there was a parade scheduled, the entire Brigade of Midshipmen literally prayed to the rain gods to send a downpour and thus cancel the parade. And those were for relatively simple parades of 4,000 Midshipman who were already living within a five-minute march of the parade field - no missiles, tanks, trucks or jet aircraft being towed around. I thought after I was commissioned I had left serious marching behind, and I was glad to do so.
But now we have a President who evidently wants a military parade “like the one in France” - meaning their Bastille Day celebrations. I am very respectful of French culture and the French military, but the idea of a big, showy, expensive parade reminds me less of our French allies and more of the old Soviet Union “Who has the biggest missile?” extravaganzas, or the truly creepy North Korean jitterbug marching style galas, with the even creepier “young leader,” Kim Jung Un, urging his nation of sycophants on in wildly over-the-top applause, which has a clap-hard-or-die feel to it.
Now let me be honest – the Navy is no doubt the service that is least attuned to the idea of marching. And I am all for doing things that honor our brave troops, especially those who have fought so bravely in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa. But I would respectfully submit that ordering a spectacle down Pennsylvania Avenue is not the best option. The last time we did a big parade like this was several decades ago and it cost over $10 million. Some estimates have the cost of a big one today topping $20 million, which would include moving all the tanks, missiles, jets, helicopters and military bands to Washington.
Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis has correctly stopped handing out little “challenge coins” from his office - symbolic tokens that officers in our armed forces give to troops. As he told me, they don’t contribute to readiness or combat capability - why waste the money? That is the Jim Mattis I know, and I’d say he’s got it right on the challenge coins. I’d recommend we apply the same logic to this kind of parade.
For the men and women who have to put in the time planning, rehearsing, creating a security plan (a parade would be an extraordinarily juicy target for the Islamic State or Al Qaeda, by the way), setting up the stands, cleaning up, taking down the stands, and getting all their gear back home would, frankly, not be having a lot of fun. This would no doubt fall on a holiday weekend (Memorial Day, Fourth of July or Veteran’s Day, of course) so there goes their hoped-for and much deserved weekend break.
Would they enjoy walking down Pennsylvania Avenue and hearing the applause? I guess. Would they enjoy a nice weekend off at the lake, among their friends and families, even more? That’s my bet. We know that we have the best-funded, most war-experienced, highest morale military in the world. That is not a threat or a boast - it is a fact. We don’t need a puffy parade to show the world we can fight. Believe me, the world knows that already.
I know this isn’t an either/or situation, but I’d prefer to see our Department of Defense, which is so well led by Jim Mattis, focus on planning for war, pushing the VA to improve, funding military families with good medical and childcare benefits, and honoring our fallen with ceremonies as they are laid to rest. Those are the best ways we can honor them.
On a smaller scale, local parades make a lot more sense - they connect to communities and help recruiting. Or here’s an idea: instead of the big parade, how about a cookout honoring the troops? With rib-eye steaks, BBQ chicken, ribs and cold beer, civilians buying, cooking and cleaning up afterward? Or just continue to say, sincerely, “Thank you for your service,” when you meet active duty troops or veterans? Let’s leave the missiles in the silos where they belong, and be quietly confident in the lethality, professionalism, and integrity of our military - no parade necessary.
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Military Parades Around The World
